For her eponymous line, Sheffield mixes metals and stones in unusual ways, embracing imperfection, sometimes intentionally setting gems upside down. “I like playing with rule-breaking techniques,” she says. “It’s still beautiful. It’s still precious. It still makes sense. But you’ve done it in a way that no one else would.” Her dragon bowl follows the same conceit, combining ingredients in a spectrum of flavors and hues. “It tastes colorful,” she says. “You have the sweetness of the orange-yellow squash. And then you have the herbaceousness of the jade rice and the fresh fennel; that’s green-tasting. And then you get a little bit of sour and funky with both the purple beet kraut and the cabbage slaw.”

Eating this way has become easier for Sheffield since late last year, when she moved to Los Angeles after spending almost two decades in New York. (Her Los Angeles store celebrates its second anniversary this month.) These days, when she needs groceries, she either wanders out to her backyard garden in Silver Lake or loads up her Mercedes hybrid with produce from the farmer’s market. Then she cooks, relishing the task’s ephemeral nature. “It’s not like my work,” she says, “where I have to document it, photograph it, price it, talk about it. It’s such a beautiful thing to create something that becomes a memory pretty much instantly.”